I was sitting peacefully on my deck mesmerized by a red-tailed hawk hunting over an alpine field with my three dogs — asleep in the sun — when I was surrounded by a scrum of teenagers. I knew all of them well, but was immediately disoriented. There was no immediate request, and for some unknown reason, they had pocketed their phones and decided to engage. They were like a little “Gen Z” wolf pack, and it seemed like they had something to say. They wanted to know what it was like to be old, and if I missed pay phones. Apparently one of them had recently been to the Ripley’s Museum in Niagara Falls, and had touched the relic’s buttons.
The soon-to-be high school graduates and other assorted upperclassmen were leaning in and on the attack. They really didn’t have a point, but who does these days? I was easily outnumbered 12 to 1, but being a veteran pundit, I was serene — if not quite relaxed. I knew I had to move from my current position for fear of being pinned down. I assessed the situation as rapidly as I could, and decided to attack back with a little bit of profanity to stun the Utah teens.
“Don’t even go there with that boomer shit,” I said.
“What?” they replied, cackling like hyenas.
“What is that? Who is even in Generation X?”
After calmly explaining that my generation was likely America’s last hope, I pivoted back to what they really cared about: celebrities and follows. I attacked with exaggerated performative indignity. It wasn’t as epic as AG Bill Barr’s paeon to performative effrontery (stay tuned for my dissection of his answers in the next few days), but it was good enough to keep the teen pack at bay.
“What do you mean that none of you know about how big David Hasselhoff is in Germany?” I contemptuously asked. They were bewildered, and it must have triggered their woke indoctrination because they shifted to billionaires. It was interesting because they didn’t seem to be upset with the idea of becoming billionaires, as much as the lack of any cool ones in their estimation.
They tried to turn the tide of the backyard struggle. “Who’s a cool billionaire?” It wasn’t posed so much as a question as it was an attack directed at me!
My son’s friend — wearing a Supreme sweatshirt and a pair of sneakers that when I randomly learned about their cost a month earlier pissed me off for two days — was a committed socialist.
“Oprah,” I said.
Everyone solemnly nodded. “She’s really good,” one of the girls said. “She is,” I replied. Everyone agreed. Then they changed the rules. “Oprah doesn’t count,” one chimed.
“Yeah,” said another and another. The chorus swelled and the momentum began to shift so I threw the Michael Jordan card. I was informed that he was too cool to count, and that I was cheating! The woke mob of teens reset the game, and laid out new rules. It was ok to be a billionaire if you were Oprah and Michael Jordan, but they wanted to know if I could name a single one in the public square who wasn’t, well, you know, Elon, or the Sacklers or…
“Name one,” they said. They couldn’t even get their collective little Gen Z beady-eyed squint going. I responded three times faster than the Texas gunslinger, who Beto O’Rourke threw a “motherfucker” at — the laughing ghoul and MAGA extremist who was amused at the conversation around the propensity with which school kids get their heads blown off by AR-15s in math class .
“Easy,” I said. “Ted Turner. Ted Turner is a legend.”
“Who?” they asked.